Well, long story short, if you want people to pay you, they need incentive to do so. And unfortunately, the MIT license provides no incentive to do so.
Those with the cash to spare and the desire to do so will donate, just as they always have. Those without either, will not donate, just as they always have.
It reads like a plee to a user's conscience, but lacks any teeth to have any more effect than any other permissively licensed donationware.
if you want people to pay you, they need incentive to do so. And unfortunately, the MIT license provides no incentive to do so.
Software is free. Experience is what counts.
You can make money by writing broken software then charging for fixes. MongoDB has their bananas valuation because they released hype-driven broken software, got it deployed globally, then everybody realized "this doesn't work! we need support!"
If your software is free and works flawlessly, average users are less inclined to pay for it. If users have money riding on top of your software, they will happily pay for commercial guarantees and support.
These days you have to release everything as open source, hope it gets wildly adopted, start getting it deployed bottom-up in large organizations, then offer large organizations support and SLAs on the software they bought.
(This is for software though. The other approach is obviously just make everything as-a-Service so everybody is paying based on their usage.)
Those with the cash to spare and the desire to do so will donate, just as they always have. Those without either, will not donate, just as they always have.
It reads like a plee to a user's conscience, but lacks any teeth to have any more effect than any other permissively licensed donationware.
Best of luck, though.